Friday, May 20, 2016

Hawaii's Legacy of Segregated Schools

Oliver Brown was a welder for the
Santa Fe Railroad living in Topeka, Kansas. His daughter went to a public
school. But instead of walking seven blocks from their home to Sumner
Elementary. Linda had to ride in a bus every day. The Browns were black. Sumner
Elementary was for white students only and it was against the law for Linda to
attend.

In 1951, Brown joined others in a class action against his
local Board of Education. They sued on the grounds that laws designed to
segregate white children from children of color was unconstitutional.

Racially segregated schools were found
all over the country. It was against the law for a white student to go to
schools designed for children of color. And of course, children of color were
absolutely prohibited from going to a white school.

After years of arguing their case
through the federal courts, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled these
laws violated the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the
United States Constitution. This week marked the sixty-second anniversary of
perhaps the most famous opinion from the high court.

That opinion changed the way we do things. Racially-segregated
schools are not only unconstitutional, but the changes in our society have made
it repugnant for most people. But what about Hawaii?

Unlike the Jim Crow South or Kansas in the 1950s, the
territory didn’t have black letter laws that racially segregated the schools.
It was more subtle than that. Hawaii took different approach.

Mandatory education for children in the islands goes back to
the days of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In 1835, the government started requiring children
to go to school. Back then, most of the children were either Hawaiian or the
descendants of white missionaries. The mass immigration of Asian and other
European workers had yet to come.

Segregation started when the missionaries, most if not all of
whom were white, built schools designed primarily to educate their own children
and to isolate them from the native population. Perhaps the most famous example
of these schools is Punahou School established in 1842. (In contrast, the
Lahainaluna Seminary in 1831 was designed to educate the Hawaiian people.).

By the time the United States acquired the islands as a
territory at the start of the twentieth century, the majority of public school
students were Asian-American children of plantation laborers. The few haole
students tended to go to private schools.

But after the expansion of the military in the islands brought
a new wave of whites migrated to the islands, newcomers were hesitant to send
their children to school with the Asian-American sons and daughters of
plantation workers.

The federal government reported in 1920 that many white and
Hawaiian parents did not want to send their kids to public schools “because
their children would be outnumbered in their classes by the orientals, who have
little in common with them and whose language difficulties impede the progress
of all.” Parents also complained that integrating proper English speakers with
students from non-English speaking homes held them back. They also feared that
if they were left with a majority of “non-American” students, they would be
susceptible to foreign influences.

The territory’s education agency, the Department of Public
Instruction, responded by setting up special schools for students who were
proficient in proper English. Pidgin wouldn’t cut it.

And so a dual education system grew in Hawaii. English
Standard Schools like Roosevelt High School on Oahu or Kaunoa Elementary in
Spreckelsville on Maui had a majority of haole students. Everyone else went to “district
schools” like McKinley High School.

As the years went on, criticism mounted. In 1940, a little
elementary school in Nuuanu Valley was selected to become an English Standard
School. The local kids at Maemae Elementary were going to be bussed out of
their community to make way for haoles. Protests erupted in front of Iolani
Palace.

Parents with Asian, Hawaiian, and Portuguese surnames
petitioned the government arguing that the segregation of children who don’t
speak proper English was prejudicial and unfair. After all, it was up to the
schools to teach proper English in the first place. Maemae Elementary ended up
becoming a partial English Standard School anyways and some kids had to be
bussed out.

Gradually, the pressure lead to the end of the English Standard
School system. By the time the Browns won their case in 1954, Hawaii had become
more integrated. Of course, there were still holdouts. Maui held on to its
English Standard Schools until 1963.

Most people these days agree with the holding and agree that
the Hawaii experiment was a bad one. And yet, to this day, there are still schools
that are predominantly white and those where most students are people of color.